Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine for this Wednesday, June 26, 2024.
Have your host, James J. Mailoff here.
At 4.30, we're going to welcome in our friend Anne, Ashley, and Brooke from the ODC looking forward to catching up with them.
Right now, we have in studio with us, Roland Hawkewood County Highway Commissioner and Past President, the Wisconsin Highway Association.
We're going to talk with Roland in a second.
Our listeners may have noted that Lance Plymouth was not with us.
Lance is a little busy, he's not able to, but did set this interview up.
We want to thank him and his staff for being able to do that.
Because Roland, I had not heard of you before, but last night, I did a deep dive into your career
and got very excited to talk with you, sir.
One thing I do want to note real quick before I get into your backstory,
I think that it's so vital that going forward, we as a society pay much, much more attention to our infrastructure.
And any opportunity to talk about that, I appreciate, and you're giving us that avenue,
but I also appreciate the work that you have put into our roads and into our infrastructure
in your whole career.
It's just amazing the work that you've done and some of the groundbreaking stuff that you've done,
and no pun intended there.
I did not realize what I was saying, as I said that, but it really is some amazing work you've done.
I want to get into some of that with you, Roland, if you don't mind it, and let's start right there.
Tell us a little bit about your backstory, your origin story, if you don't mind.
Sure. I'm originally from Western Pennsylvania.
My father was a truck driver, had a trucking business,
which got me interested in highways roads, spent a lot of time traveling with him.
When I graduated high school, my goal was to become an engineer.
I spent a little time in the service, got an opportunity to come to Wisconsin,
and worked with Wisconsin DOT as an intern, co-op.
Eventually, I graduated college, got a full-time job, spent 15 years with Wisconsin DOT,
working both design construction.
Then I stepped out of the DOT and into private, did eight years of consulting,
worked with a couple of firms, some smaller firms, some larger firms,
and then an opportunity came about to work with the Wood County Highway Department as the engineer,
spent six years in the engineering position, and then I've been the highway commissioner now
for the last six years.
Roland, in that experience, being kind of away from public service and the private sector a little bit,
coming back to working with the states and everything, what did you learn from that experience?
The experience working with private was fantastic.
And what I tell people today is I couldn't do this job if I didn't have those experiences.
I couldn't do it well. I'll put it to you that way.
My career kind of took me through learning through the DOT's experience,
how to define the box, what engineering parameters are.
And once you start working for the private industry,
their goal is to do things that are more efficient, cost less, find those things that they
can get by without having to spend a lot of dollars making it work.
So then I came back to the highway department.
And the highway department is a smaller scale to DOT.
We still got to follow a lot of specifications that are outlined by the feds in the state.
But we also get to do a lot of things that,
similar to the private industry, we're looking for ways to save money, cut down on cost and time,
and things that just saved the residents of Wood County more by being able to do things
a little timelier, a little less expensive.
And especially in rural communities where you may not have the funds that you normally
would in like a big city or some of that, and you certainly don't have the
infrastructure to work with as well. Those things become even more important decisions.
And where to, you know, you only got so much budget, you only have so much of the pie,
where do we put this, where do we put that? I imagine that scheduling is also a big part of this
of when to do these things and the analytics to go behind that.
Absolutely. We have a, I call it a small budget when you compare it to large counties,
but we do a lot of work for municipalities. So towns and villages and
what we end up doing is we schedule a five-year plan. Projects are started design,
you know, three, four years in advance. So when we get into the design or should say we get to
the construction phase, we have windows where we can, you know, do work for municipalities.
And that helps us because we've invested in, you know, equipment and trucks, an asphalt plant,
you know, all kinds of equipment that, you know, we get to utilize for our local communities,
save them money as well. And that scheduling of those projects, we work around a very short window
when you consider construction season, usually from about the middle of May to the middle of October.
A lot of towns want to have their projects completed before school starts, so we're not delaying,
busing, stumbling that. So it's a, it gets challenging. We meet every week, or my management team,
we meet every week. We talk about every project that's on our list. And we do this with only,
like, 40 people, our highway department's 40 people. And we accomplish a lot in a short time
period. And sometimes we run into issues that, you know, weather helps, you know, like recently,
the lot of rain we had, it doesn't help, but we react to things as much as we can, and we try not
to bite off more than what we can handle. It's incredible when you think about that, and you give
us a number like 40 people, like that, that's just incredible. That amount of people get such
important and such great work done and accomplish as much as they do. That is really a credit and
a tip of the hat to them and your team and everybody that works on this and all the different things
to go, all the different factors that work into that. And you mentioned the weather, and I've always
been curious of how well you can, you certainly can't plan for it any more than we, any of us,
you know, can as citizens and everything, but working around that when you do have delays,
I always find interesting how you're able to work, you know, not only around that, but make
reschedule things and stay on point. It's very, it just speaks again to good people doing good
work and, you know, sitting back and letting them do that in many ways. You recently had, or
joined by the CBG, and you had the opportunity to, they had the opportunity to visit a wood county
and talk a little bit about DBEs and the recycled asphalt that is going on with a lot of our roads
nowadays. I think a lot of us, we certainly pay attention to orange cone season, we certainly
pay attention, I can't go down that road because they're working on it, but as far as when that road
is up and running, we're just driving over. We're not thinking too much about what's the materials
that are made of. This is really interesting to me when I was telling my mom and dad about it,
they were blowing up, they're like, really, well, this is fascinating. Can we talk a little bit
about this, this process or what is going into these roads? Sure. Wood County is very fortunate,
that we are one of, I think, 15 counties who have an asphalt plant, meaning that we get to produce
our own asphalt. There's a private side that produces asphalt and they do pretty much similar
same work as we do. However, when we start looking at our costs and expense of making asphalt,
what we do today is we reclaim old pavements. We have our own crushing equipment and we'll use
that equipment to crush old asphalt and then we recycle it. So 30% of the new asphalt we're putting
down today is it consists of recycling asphalt. So the expense of asphalt today isn't necessarily
the amount of aggregates that are going into it, they're obviously expensive, but it's the amount
of oil. When I started working for the highway department, we were buying oil at about $350
and that's only 5% of what makes up an asphalt. So if you take a ton of asphalt,
5% of that mix is the oil. Today, it's closer to $700 a ton. So when we start utilizing
recycled asphalt, we're not only getting the recycled aggregates, we're also recycling the oil
that's in the old oil or the old pavements that we're reclaiming. Wow. Which I can only imagine
what we were just talking about before, especially when you don't have a gigantic budget or anything,
every penny counts, that's got to help quite a bit. It does. It does. It's also unique too,
with repurposing, recycling, something we've been talking about and doing since the early 80s,
even before that, but really hit at home where every home was starting to do it and everything
a little bit more going out of the late 80s and 90s. And here is another extension of that,
where our roads are using recycled materials and saving our communities money along with
really creating safe roads. Correct. And it's also preserving resources. You start thinking about
the amount of aggregate that if you didn't recycle or mines or quarries, how much faster they'd
be using up our resources. It's really interesting. How long has this been going on?
There's a number of counties that are just now getting into it. Wood County has been recycling
asphalt for probably 15 years now. Okay. And it saves us a lot of money. I can imagine. Yeah.
That's really good. I really appreciated the learning that. I think a lot of us
or didn't know that beforehand. It's insightful. It's interesting. We're speaking with
Roll and Hawk, Wood County Highway Commissioner and Past President, Wood County, Wisconsin County
Highway Association. Along with our friends from Wisconsin's Rapids Community Media being here as
well, I want to send a big shout out to them. Encourage you to go to YouTube, subscribe to their
page, keep up the date with the great work that they are doing. A roll that I wanted to get into
a little bit about our traffic situations and how that can be this time of year for people.
When we're talking closed roads and situations that we don't always run into in everyday life.
You had a couple of notes about this. Yes. We try to notify the public well in advance of when
projects are going to happen. And unfortunately, you know, people don't always get a chance to
attend our meetings or see our Facebook or social media, whatever to understand that. So some folks,
the first time they know about a project or at least they claim they know about a project is when
we start putting up signs and indicating the roads going to be closed. So we do everything we can to
accommodate the local folks. Anybody who has a destination within a project, we do everything we
can to make it accessible. However, what happens is, you know, we put up signs that say it closed
to through traffic or local traffic only. And people who don't have a destination within our
construction project will often assume that because they live nearby, they're considered local
traffic so they can pass through the construction zone. It's not safe for one thing. I mean, because our
guys are out there trying to do their job and, you know, we're still, you know, people are still passing
through. And the thing I'd like to explain to people is that you see that yellow equipment,
it's large, it's heavy. And the operator has a hard time seeing around them. And we've had a number
of incidents where people will drive right up behind that equipment, expect any operator to
know he's there and let him through. And fortunately, we've not had any, you know, major accidents or
incidents, but it's an inconvenience. A lot of times, personal property becomes damaged because
they're in a work zone. It's just not, you know, it's just not good business to have to stop and
let people through. It slows down the process. So what we like to do is we like to provide a
detour. Obviously, sometimes that detour isn't inconvenience and people will take the shortest
shortcut or they'll try to skirt through the project. If we can, we'll let people
through outside of our hours when we're operating, we'll pull the barricades to a soft closure so
people can still get through. But a lot of times, that's, it's just not possible. And a lot of
times we have to resort to notifying the sheriff's department or the local PD and they'll come out
and make a presence. And usually that will slow it down for a while, but without them being around,
the habit continues to come back. So just like to have people understand that when we put up signs
and road closures, if you can stay out of there until we're done, the project will much faster
and you'll be back to the habit that you've been prior to the construction.
You know, I think we can all agree that they can be a bit of a headache sometimes when it comes
to it, you know, having to go a different route or anything like that. I would say not speaking
for anybody else, but I do believe a lot of people have healed similar. A bigger inconvenience
are potholes or not having good roads or not having good workers on those roads. And that's what
we could have lose if we don't do these things and follow the law quite bluntly. We need more
people to be able to hear this, do these kind of things. It's important not only for these workers
and their safety, for you and your safety, but also to get the job done. You know, everybody wants
this construction done tomorrow. Everybody does. And including the workers themselves, they want to
go on to future projects. They want to have other things on their plate, but it takes time.
While infrastructure and roads, whatever it seems like to you, I promise you there is a lot more
detail that goes into that building that road or that infrastructure than we could ever imagine.
People like Roland and that know much more about it than we ever will probably. It's important
to keep that in mind when we're talking about this. We all use these roads. We all need these roads.
You know, keeping an eye out, following the rules of the road is the least we can do.
And what we're finding today is a lot of folks navigate with their phones. You know,
they plug into a Maps app and sometimes our construction projects don't show up on there to tell
them that it's been detoured. We do have access now to an app that will notify the Google Maps
program that we do have some projects. It helps when more folks are on that app and it can,
you know, it's a smart app and it transfers that information as people pass through the area.
But a lot of times people don't have the same app and they'll end up in our work zone and they don't
know where to go. All I ask is that if you know, put your phone down, you see the order signs,
pay attention. There's generally going to be some indication of where that, you know,
that detour is and how to get on it so you can stay out of the work zone.
We touch on this in our morning shows and some of our other shows whenever we have the
opportunity. So I will take the springboard as you're setting it up there and piggy back off of
that with it is orange cone season and we encourage people to slow down to keep an eye out for these
workers. Even if you don't see a worker, it doesn't mean that they're not busy or not doing
something. You might not just be able to see them slow down, keep an eye out on those roads.
There is nowhere you're going that is worth a risk of hurting one of these individuals just
trying to do their job, just trying to work and really do right by us as a community and take
care of our roads and do some good work for us, the whole community. So at least we can do again
letting them do their job as safe as possible. I heard you and Pam talking a little bit before
interview in our pregame a bit and she noted that you were the reason we have this roundabout
in front of our building here and everything. I thought that was kind of interesting. Yes,
why I was working for Wisconsin DOT, an opportunity came about for me to go to some training
and I had been working with the engineering staff at the time here in Wisconsin Rapids area
on Highway 54 and the 17th intersection here and it just so happened I was sitting in a class
to learn about design and roundabouts and this opportunity came up, I sketched it up,
came back, talked to my supervisor and there was some folks in the DOT at the time who weren't
sure about it yet and essentially what they they said was if you can get the city to agree to it
then yes we'll move forward with it. So at the time Mayor Vrginsky was in office and we went met
with him. He loved the idea and his staff found out that it was going to be a lot less expensive
to construct that there this intersection versus they had several alternatives that included
additional lights and other things and so then we passed a concept onto our design team and the
designers went ahead and designed we have out here so I like it I think it flows very well and
it's reduced the number of crashes in this intersection. And there's the key part like there's
any pushback or anything I ever hear about roundabouts and I've been hearing in my whole life
where a lot of my families from in Naperville and in Illinois it's it's pretty much the home of
roundabouts like there is like a roundabout next to a roundabout next to a roundabout it just seems
like there's a lot of them over there but I've been hearing about this my whole life and there are
some people that you know they just use a roundabout they don't really think much about it and then
there are of course people that bark about them but I always come back to with that the safety
issue because no matter where there's a roundabout that road beforehand and now with a roundabout
is definitely safer. The numbers speak for themselves when it comes to this.
Do you think that this is something because I'm curious about this part too when we're talking
about roundabout something that is not a new invention but new we're in the industry as far as
you know new new things come up every 30 30 years or what have you we're using recycled materials
for our roads. The evolution of this industry and the time that you've been in it you've had to
have seen some pretty interesting things that have come about. I just kind of wanted to touch on
that before we let you go today. A number of things you know not just the engineering concepts like
a roundabout but technology. When I started as an engineer we were drafting by hand you know
the computers were just you know simple commands and easy line alignments and today
the technology is it starts at the serving the gentleman in person who goes out and doesn't
serving has a basically a 3D model generated when they go back and sit down they plug into their
software program and then you can incorporate your design into that and the program will help you
develop three-dimensional plans and now that we have that three-dimensional plan we can download
that into another program and you can pass it on to the contractors or your construction folks
and their equipment using satellite technology can almost grade the road without them you know
they need to be there to operate them by the technology is there to give them cuts and fills and
stuff like that right on the machine. It's fascinating yeah it's really interesting. I got to tell
you a role and you're going to have to come back sometime because I got follow questions to that
and other things so I'm really looking forward to talking again sometime but thank you for
the information today I did want to wrap up a little bit encouraging people to stop by your office
say hi maybe ask questions that you might have follow questions out there you out there listening
or I'm just curious about the industry in general and be sure to ask Roland if you stop by his
office about big bend the bear I wanted to get that story about big bend the bear I think we
got a little time for it or anything you've got a big stuffed bear and I mean a big stuffed bear
your office there how did that happen. It's just so happened that I was I had a bear tag in 2007
and the neighbor that lives by me in Port Edwards has some property in the town of Sherry offered to
let me hunt and I was just lucky enough to harvest this bear and it was a very large bear had a
local taxidermers do a full body mount on it and I'm as I mentioned originally from Pennsylvania
I'm a Steelers fan and Ben Rothisberger was a quarterback and I still love Ben to this day he was
a great quarterback it just happened to I nicknamed him big bend that's okay that where there we go
yeah that's now I see the tie in there interestingly enough this bear is about the size of Ben
Rothisberger that it's about the size of him so they're very unit that it's a fitting name for this
bear that's awesome thank you for that story appreciate that really do appreciate the time
Roland but most importantly appreciate the work that you're putting into our infrastructure into
our our roads and our safety and making sure our families our friends everybody is safe on those
roads we appreciate the work you're doing thank you thank you for the time if people have
followed questions one and the more about some what we talked about today how can they reach you
they can call our office 715 412-8875 currently through our summer we work a 410 schedule so
generally Monday through Thursday otherwise after September we're back in there five days a week
so you can reach us anytime excellent again thank you for the time Roland you want to send a big thank
you to our friends at Wisconsin Rapids Community Media as well be sure to go to youtube subscribe to
their page keep up to date with the great work that they are doing over there we'll have more midday
magazine coming up for you right here at 97 5 FM 13 20 AM WF HR locally grown radio